Cave Dwellers

The Wild Boys

installation at Artspace, Sydney

Photo courtesy of the Wild Boys

Artswipe was hanging in a cave last week… a cave at Artspace. No, this was not Plato's cave – Artswipe has already loitered in that dark-hole-in-the-wall and let me tell you, representation has never been so fucked up in its metaphoricality. Yes, that's right, Artswipe's been really getting into ending rather commonplace words with "-ality". Made by a pack of cave dwellers known as the Wild Boys (Trevor Fry as Trix, Richard Gurney as Sonic Yootha and Tim Hilton as La Donna Rama) this installation forms part of the exhibition It's a New Day. Curated by Sally Breen, the exhibition, which explores process-driven art practice, also features Sarah Goffman, Lisa Kelly, Josie Cavallaro, Anne Kay and numerous collaborators.

So I am experiencing this cave, waiting for my own primal moment. There wasn't even any womb or penis envy involved, just a good old fashioned art-cave more glamorous and gimcrack in flavour than Plato could have ever imagined. Having sat on the delicately positioned cushions for awhile, watching a video work about an old man, a seagull and a suitcase – enigmatic – Artswipe got a little nostalgic for the old days. You know, back when we all lived in caves, spoke an obscure native tongue, celebrated the loin cloth and waited for the onset of modernity.

It wasn't until I looked at the art-cave's markings that I realised there was no dot painting to be seen. Rather these tribal configurations seemed to derive from Dotti – that girly store franchise that sells dancepartyslutskirts for the tweenywhorebrigade among us. Oh now I get it! This is a gay cave. So this is what it must be like to be inside a rectum, I thought. Those gay boys really know how to break down barriers. When I say "gay cave" I don't mean what the ten-year-olds mean when they say, "That is so gay." I mean gay as in Kylie, Madonna, Cher. The kind of gay that has its own special access to irony; if you don't get the intertextual minutia the door bitch doesn't let you in. And good on her; knowing your popular culture and knowing it well is a rare talent and it's what makes the day gay.

The Wild Boys
It's a New Day opening night, Artspace
Photo courtesy of cactusboy666

Having given up rebirthing because my psychic space hasn't been so great since the last time I tried, I decided to check out what's on the other side of the cave. Otherness is often a trumped up term for the simple fact that some of us don't like anyone but ourselves. But seeing I spent my mid20s getting into community formations and out again, Artswipe decided getting on the other side is exactly the tonic of the hour. So gathering all my strength (and realising the constant move between first and third person makes language very crowded) Artswipe decided to risk entering the white cube. Tunneling through to the other side where otherness comes gay and nubile, Artswipe entered a paradise of amylsoaked whipsmart spatial frenzy.

Some wiccan-lookin drag-chick known as La Donna Rama (Tim Hilton) hulahoops on the big screen (much like she did opening night, as pictured above). A visual alphabet of cheesy disco albums adorn the wall on one side, toy knives and machetes on the other. Silver toy blowup guitars and mallets litter the floor in that casually messy but precise manner (the gays get that balance so right with their hair as well). It's then I find I have fully rebirthed despite myself. Cavorting on the floor – what else do you do when the moment grabs you – I was back in my teenage bedroom with posters on the wall, listening to American Top 40 with Shadoe Stevens on the radio. I am in my own private music video and nobody can take that away from me.

Swamped

Sarah Goffman
Kingswood Swamp, 2004
From Alien Invasion, MOP Projects catalogue, 2005

Courtesy of the artist and MOP Projects

It's no secret, Artswipe gets pathetically nostalgic for art school life all the time. Oh those were the days. I recall the good times, sitting around in circles biting each others' heads off (or giving some good old fashioned art school head) in "crits" while the lecturers swanned around reminding the kids that art is hard so get used to it!

You can probably imagine then, the anguish I have been experiencing in recent weeks with all this bullshit about the National Art School's potential merger with the College of Fine Arts and the closing down of the University of Western Sydney's fine arts and electronic arts programs.

Where will the kids go to make art? Is it a coincidence that anti-sedition is all the rage with the Howard government at the same time art schools are a dying breed? Sedition laws, which significantly impact artists, were passed less than a year ago, and now art is being threatened again in a way that's linked to the government. The lifeblood of the arts – its government funded university art schools – are under threat. Higher education itself has never been part of Howard's agenda. Adequate funding to keep alive a culture of educated types is just not relevant in a country that, for instance, celebrates Steve Irwin and shuns Germaine Greer. If Greer gets stung by a bee, has a severe reaction and dies, will her funeral be televised? Will people avenge her by killing all the bees?

The brilliant thing about NAS and COFA is they are such dynamically different institutions. I'm not going to play favourites and say one has a better approach to art education because they both excel in their own unique ways. As for UWS, well that place produces art student powder kegs who come from the west or choose the west for their art education. I've fantasised many a time of what it must be like to make art in the west, or at least show at Casula Powerhouse. Casula features in most of my dark fantasies because Ivan Millat once drove through there picking up a hitchiker. In one of my favourite night sweats, I am a conscientious citizen who jots down the number plate, goes home and paints it, acrylic on canvas.

Oh and all the fantasies I could conjure about UWS. All those parklands surrounding the vast campus. Artswipe would never catch a train all the way to Kingswood without being guaranteed some good old fashioned date rape in those dark woods. So basically I'm yet to catch that train. I mean, really, the Kingswood campus even has a fucking swamp! And the swamp's inspired artists like Tracey Moffatt and Sarah Goffman to make art and I'm pretty sure they didn't study art at UWS. Basically a university with a swamp needs an art school attached to it. Mandatory.

Tracey Moffatt
Artist at Work, 1997
(represented in Sydney by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery)

Swamps bring out the Julia Kristeva in all of us and it's at art school we read that wonderful book, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982). My favourite line: "During that course in which 'I' become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit" (emphasis added). While Kristeva wasn't talking about an art course per se, she may as well accept the fact that we all read this at art school and it became the mess mantra. Remember that old saying that there's a time for everything under the sun? Well, that includes having your perfunctory grunge period, where you go all abject and degenerate, piss all over the car park, photograph it, photocopy the photograph, post it on the noticeboard (the one which is only read by engineering students) and document it all over again but this time with whatever body fluid is your favourite that week. When I went through my grunge period, dandruff was my medium because I was saving my body fluids in a time capsule. The Powers of Horror was my textbook - I was really getting into subverting boundaries, borders and binaries - and I paid enough in library late fines to have been able to buy at least three copies of it.

Well, art school date rape has taken on new highs because it seems UWS has been raped and pillaged of its esteemed arts programs. Sari Kivinen, who was a shortlisted for the 2006 Helen Lempriere Traveling Art Scholarship and reviewed in an earlier Artswipe post (you might remember Sari drinking her multiple personalities under the table, or at least in the kitchen sink) is spokesperson for the blog Save UWS Arts and internet petition. Organised by UWS students, the blog and petition are gaining much momentum and support, which is great. Stay tuned for protests - if you're lucky they may even take place at the campus bar, which I'm told is called The Swamp Bar.

Art Satan

California Dreams (pre-Philip Brophy makeover)

I'm becoming very predictable. Really, I never thought I'd write another Artswipe post citing the gorgeous man of all things glam -

Philip Brophy. As he's showing at a post-Lempriere Artspace, and there's really not that much else on, I couldn't help but dedicate this next song to Philip.

Featuring three solo projects by seemingly divergent artists, Artspace is like one big salad at the moment. To the left is Gary Carsley doing his drag/daguerreotype thing sealed with a fairly innocuous but knowing reference to Björk's least interesting song "Venus as a Boy". (Note to self: I must get to the fucking Chauvel and see Drawing Restraint... I must also recharge my iPod). In the middle of Artspace, as one enters the gallery is Maria Cruz, that zany den mother of the monochromatic moment unofficially paying tribute to my favourite game: Million Bucks (and everyone has to know). It's a variation of Pin the Tail on the Donkey. You close your eyes, point to someone ugly in the street and that's the next person you have to have sex with. And everyone has to know. In return you get a million bucks. This game is aka Charity Fuck. Actually, that's not at all what Cruz's work is about, but that's my interpretation and I'm sticking to it.

Performance art moment: Skanky Jane puts a blindfold on Artswipe. Spin around. Of course the blindfold is made out of organza, so Artswipe gets to sit pretty looking down on all creation. At that moment Artswipe knows everything and has power over what's hot and what's not. Biopower, actually. Kant incarnate mulling over the colour chart of life, Artswipe decides what images will be heritage-listed this season. Point and fuck. And if everyone has to know about it, then that's cool because the Press Release is Artswipe's favourite literary genre right now.

Who do I point at? Philip Brophy: Art Satan.

Turn right at Maria Cruz and Brophy's Evaporated Music 2: At the Mouth of Metal is playing. Actually, walk into Artspace and his Dolby 5.1 "aural surgery" can be heard contaminating the whole Gunnery like acne spreading its putrefied pointillism teen crackwhore style. A scene from the early '90s TV show California Dreams is given a Brophy metal remix. I don't recall California Dreams, but it gives off a kind of Hillsong vibe in its peachy pastel glaze of righteous rock.

File under: Inspirational.

In his artist statement, Brophy writes: "Like Satan summoned in the middle of the high school prom, Evaporated Music 2 rescores these vapid TV studio-floor moments with the sound of Metal. Think Disney riddled with cancer. The Wiggles sweating with Hep B. Evaporated Music 2 welcomes the most Other of music – Metal – and amplifies its guttural explosions through the healthy bodies of television's dream of contented pop music."

With hands raised, not to the Lord, but Lordi (the Finnish monster mash maelstrom who won the 2006 Eurovision Song Contest) Brophy's taped-off-tv loop of California Dreams (with its, I think it was Channel 7, watermark still intact) is a glittering tribute to what might happen if Delta Goodrem was raped by a crate of ice cold Pepsi dildos.

Lordi.

Punch Drunk

Sari TM Kivinen
Drunk in the Kitchen Sink Again, video, 2006

Courtesy of the artist and Artspace.

The Art Life has done it again. "What did the Team do?" I hear you ask. "Beat me to the punch with an overview of the Art Award love-in circus currently spreading like a sexually transmitted hybrid media disease." If I ever get around to writing an art theory book, it will be an ethnographic tell-all memoir about how awards have been passed down from ancient civilizations to ensure marginal culture groups (like the artworld) have the opportunity to have a burger named after them at the Burger Bun. And it's about time: there's only so many Logies, Oscars and Aria Awards you can eat. Now artists can stop pretending they'd prefer Sushi Train and feel justified going down to a local food court and purchasing a "Lempriere, hold the lettuce." Primavera artist Julia de Ville would be working in the kitchen making all sorts of taxidermy treasures from the mince patties before they made their way to the bun.

I always thought art was too cool for words, let alone awards. Awards are tres tragic and that's why we use awards ceremonies as a good excuse for a party. For instance, last time the Emmy Awards were on, I had to watch with a bunch a friends and a case of champagne, if only to perform a taxonomic analysis of how many times Hollywood celebrities like Rachel Griffiths and Christina Applegate were sprung turning up to the same do in the same dress.

Well that's exactly what happened to me at the Primavera and Helen Lempriere opening nights held recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Artspace respectively. I turned up both nights wearing the same dress as a very famous art star, whose name I cannot divulge. (You know who you are, bitch!) But true to form I had too much to drink after only an hour or so and spewed Burger Bun chunks all over my Lisa Ho. Never mind, I always have a change of clothes underneath – just in case. Seeing I had not yet invented my Twin Towers costume, the spare change was this slinky denim corset, beaded with "glitter licks" (my term) and hemmed with a deconstructed Tsubi like stitching. Where the fuck is my award for even documenting such minutia, such ephemera, such low down, top grade grandeur?

But no, awards don't come easily when the sun comes up the next morning and you realise your friends haven't SMS'd you in like twenty minutes. You've been dropped. They are too embarrassed to be called your friend, even though they need you because you're a more important artist than they are. It is you who is always being shortlisted – not such much for awards than for jobs at Ikea – but never mind, you've used a few tan-coloured coffee tables in your installation art from time to time to make the whole application process worthwhile. It's when those same "friends" make a beeline for the other side of the street while holding Zanny Begg inspired placards that read "BEING DRUNK IS NOT PERFORMANCE ART." And on the other side of the placard, Mitch Cairns has rendered your image - all nervous line work and naive stylings in vomit coloured crayons. OK, so maybe now I am sounding like that anonymous SLUT who had the nerve on my own comment forum to call me "a spoiled brat" for dissing the Biennale volunteer slave drive. Actually s/he may just be right.

But what is that I see over there, shining its data-projected light onto an Artspace wall? It's Sari TM Kivinen, emerging star of the dark night. The Art Life made brief mention to this little vixen of the yard glass, and I'd like to take the opportunity to elaborate. Frankly, I'd like to thank Kivinen for showing me the way. In her video Drunk in the Kitchen Sink Again, Kivinen does something no one really does anymore: make work about being drunk rather than actually assuming alcohol is an artist's natural adjunct (with or without awards).

In the video, Kivinen sits in the sink manufacturing a slow building intensity that erupts in a train of rabid affects. Seducing with a sweet smile or a butterfly lullaby before growling like a Diamanda Galas banshee gripping the wine bottle in a tightfisted presidential handshake, Kivinen's video climaxes in a fit of "low-fi" toe-eating self-loathing. Searching for this Kivinen lady online to see who she is, what she's on about, and how I can join her AA group, I stumbled on her website, which details a whole sordid backstory spun around three fictional characters called Jessee-Liina, Caroliina and Starella. Sisters with a hereditary weakness to alcohol, they can be socialites with a taste for the sherry bottle (as in Jessee-Liina, who is seen on the website cavorting with those gorgeous think-pink-tanks, The Motel Sisters) or Caroliina, who is a jealous tipsy bitch unstuck by Jessee-Liina's popularity, or Starella, the mad one who gets all downward spiral on the piss. Starella is so troubled, she bathes in a fruity punch polluted by her own weeping mascara.

Kivinen writes:

"Starella is the youngest of the Liina sisters. Armed with a mean temper Starella often appears out of control and out of sync with this world. As the youngest Starella is infinitely influenced by sister Caroliina's drinking habits- taking it ten folds over the limit without a care about what anybody thinks.

"Starella often comes across like a wild animal caged and confused, however she is completely aware and in control of this primal impression and finds strength in her out of control behaviour and uses this image to protect her true self from the harsh opinions of her older sisters. Starella relishes embracing her own demons and enjoys the fun of never knowing where she’s gonna wake up next."

So I am assuming it's Starella making the appearance in Kivinen's compelling Lempriere video. Or could it be Kivinen after all, muckraking certain reality/fiction distinctions? As her website explains, "Most importantly, Kivinen explores her own fears of becoming an alcoholic, due to her own genetic predisposition. She does this by passing the buck to her characters by exploring how the sisters individually deal with their alcoholic genes."

Now I am totally convinced: Kivinen deserved the Lempriere award because she brings a refreshing honesty to her practice that I haven't seen in years, one that makes me long for sobriety (and then discard that longing as a form of false consciousness). Furthermore, I just know that Kivinen would have used the money for more "art supplies" - the liquid kind.